Michael Palin talks about his latest travelling project

Michael Palin who is appearing at the Auditorium at the ECHO arena during Liverpool Comedy Festival

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He's just chalked up a landmark 50 years in showbiz and played in front of tens of thousands of fervent fans at a string of sell-out Python reunion shows at London’s O2.

You’d think Michael Palin would be ready to put his feet up.

Then again, this is the man who went around the world in 80 days and travelled from pole to pole.

So the news he’s about to embark on a 21-night tour of the UK with his latest volume of diaries – Travelling to Work – really shouldn’t come as any real surprise.

“That’s the thing,” he says. “I’m trying to somehow maintain a balance between work and play, but I find it very hard to say no.”

Surprisingly perhaps, given the golden half-century he’s spent performing, this is the 71-year-old’s first ever solo stage tour.

“Over the years I’ve done a lot of one-man shows, usually just for one evening, either to raise money at a charity event or at a book festival,” he explains. “I’ve really quite enjoyed them. It’s a nice format and I like talking to a live audience.

“And with the diaries coming out this month, I thought, what can I do that’s a little bit different to anything I’ve done before?

“I can go right around the country and hopefully entertain audiences about the 25 years since we did Around the World in 80 Days.

“Also, I can put that period of the 1990s in context and enjoy reminiscing with a live audience.”

That includes a date at the Auditorium at the ECHO arena next month which, while outside the main 10-day event, has been included in the Liverpool Comedy Festival line-up for 2014.

“There’s nowhere quite like Liverpool,” Michael smiles. “What I so enjoy about the city is the pace of life. It’s still on a human scale.

“When you ask a Liverpudlian a question you get a conversation. Even the most commonplace reply is never complete without elaborations, teases, poetic embellishments and references to your haircut.

“Liverpool audiences love jokes and stories, so for a comedian it’s both tantalising and testing.

“You’ve got to be on your metal.”

Michael Edward Palin is, of course, a northern lad himself, the son of a steel engineer having been born in Sheffield in 1943.

An early performing role was at primary school when, in what would turn out to be the first in a number of female characters during his career, he played Martha Cratchit in A Christmas Carol.

He went on to study history at Oxford where he started writing and performing his own comedy material, later on working with fellow future Python Terry Jones.

“My fondest memory,” he reveals, “is of Edinburgh in August and September 1964. I appeared in an Oxford University Revue with Terry and others.

“It was the first time I’d actually been on a stage night after night to perform comedy, some of which I’d written myself, and it was such a great thrill to do that. I realised I could make audiences laugh.

“It was quite life-changing, because for the first time I thought, ‘hey, the acting and the humour and all the things I enjoy most in life could possibly make me a living’.

“My father disagreed profoundly, but that was a very important moment for me.”

While you can understand his dad’s concern, it’s Palin junior who has had the last laugh. Or at least the ongoing laughter of millions over the past few decades.

The continuing popularity of Monty Python, who first all worked together writing for The Frost Report, can be seen in the rush for tickets when it was announced the remaining members were due to come together for a series of live shows earlier this year.

“The original spirit in which those sketches were written, and the reaction we had when they were first written, all comes back,” Michael says.

“We couldn’t have done those shows if we didn’t believe in the material and if we didn’t think we could make it funny again.”

All the Pythons have gone off to do their own projects over the years, not least Michael.

There were Python-related projects - Ripping Yarns with Terry Jones, A Fish Called Wanda with John Cleese, and appearances in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky and as a thinly-disguised Derek Taylor in Eric Idle’s Beatles’ take-off The Rutles.

He wrote a novel - Hemingway’s Chair, and appeared in films like the Missionary, as well as Alan Bleasdale’s GBH (the Liverpool writer gets a mention in the latest published diaries).

But it was his TV travel odyssey Around the World in 80 Days, filmed in 1988, which set him on another major career path.

In it, he travelled as closely as possible the same route as the Jules Verne story, all without flying.

Travelling to Work covers the period 1988 to 1998.

“It begins with my misgivings about having embarked on Around the World in 80 Days,” Michael admits. “I discovered some little private thoughts I’d written down – not the diaries I use for work or for writing the book – which seem to suggest I was deeply worried about what I’d taken on.

“You get the feeling of someone not embarking on what he thought was going to be a legendary breakthrough in travel television, but someone who was absolutely terrified.”

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, he needn’t have worried. Around the World in 80 Days was simply the starting point for a two-decade journey which has seen the actor, writer and comedian journey ‘Full Circle’ around the Pacific, across the Sahara, through the Himalayas, around ‘new Europe’ and, most recently, through Brazil.

Phew.

He’s never done a Bill Bryson though and taken his magnifying glass to the UK.

How, one wonders, would he present Liverpool if he was visiting the city for a travel programme?

“I’d show my audience the magnificent Three Graces buildings on the waterfront, to remind them of the historic power and influence of the port of Liverpool,” he says.

“I’d take them to the Everyman to remind them of how many great actors, writers and directors were given their break here.

“And then to a pub, just to sit and listen to the chat and the music.”

● Michael Palin is at The Auditorium at ECHO arena on October 11. Liverpool Comedy Festival runs from September 23 - October 5.